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Abstract
Two books of memoirs (1939 and 1968) by Colonel Segismundo Casado have been widely used by historians to explain the catastrophic end of the Spanish Civil War. Casado may have enjoyed the assistance of MI6 in writing the first. For the second he was supported by services of the Francoist government. Both works are completely untrustworthy. Their principal message is that the purpose of his infamous coup of 5 March 1939 was to prevent an alleged communist takeover of the republican army supposedly designed to prolong the war. He thus portrayed the coup as an act of patriotism. This is as nonsensical as the subliminal message that the then Prime Minister Juan Negrín was a pawn of the communists and hence of Stalin. Both messages still enjoy currency today. The Casado entry in the recent biographical dictionary sponsored by the Spanish Royal Academy of History shows how deeply messages of this kind have shaped right-wing and neo-Francoist views.
Notes
1 Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991), Chapter 64 (702–10), describes Casado's coup. His reliance on Casado's memoirs is clearly apparent (see pp. 929–30).
2 For substantial information on the background to the coup, see Helen Graham's enlightening ‘Casado's Ghosts: Demythologizing the End of the Spanish Republic’, ‘Agonía republicana’: Living the Death of an Era. Essays on the Spanish Civil War, ed., with an Intro., Susana Bayó Belenguer, Ciaran Cosgrove and James Whiston, BSS, LXXXIX:7–8 (2012), 255–78.
3 See in particular: Ángel Viñas, El honor de la República. Entre el acoso del Eje, la hostilidad británica y la política de Stalin (Barcelona: Crítica, 2008); Ángel Viñas and Fernando Hernández Sánchez, El desplome de la República (Barcelona: Crítica, 2009); Ángel Viñas, ‘Segismundo Casado Lopez. Coronel’, in 25 Militares de la República, coord. Javier García Fernández, (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 2011), 215–60. For the general reader, see: Ángel Viñas and Fernando Hernández Sánchez, ‘El golpe de Casado y el final de la guerra’, El País, 5 March 2009, <http://elpais.com/diario/2009/03/05/opinion/1236207611_850215.html>, Viñas and Hernández Sánchez, ‘Los mitos de la derrota. Todos contra todos’, La Aventura de la Historia, 125 (2009), 27–31, and Viñas and Hernández Sánchez, ‘El fin de la República. La invención del coronel Casado’, La Aventura de la Historia, 170 (2012), 24–29.
4 I am aware that Payne is a well-known academic and that Bolloten had leant towards the communists during the Civil War. As a fairly comfortably well-off estate agent, the latter devoted his whole life to a permanent rewriting of the war from a strong anti-communist perspective. Neither of them relies on primary sources and both are highly influenced by Cold War paradigms on the interpretation of the Civil War.
5 These harsh judgments are based upon my analysis of new primary evidence found in the Rafael Fernández de la Calzada papers in the Archivo General Militar, Alava (AGMA, FCP). Fernández de la Calzada was Casado's aide de camp when they left Spain at the end of March 1939 and shared his exile in London until Casado left for Latin America. I intend to exploit these papers fully at a later date. Agustín Carreras Zalama has given a brief description of these papers in ‘El archivo privado de Don Rafael Fernández de la Calzada y Ferrer: información sobre un fondo del Archivo General Militar de Ávila’, Boletín Informativo del Sistema Archivístico de la Defensa, 13 (2007), 8–11.
6 The role of the communists in the Spanish Civil War has been subject to misconceptions and heated discussions. For a full analysis based on primary evidence see Fernando Hernández Sánchez, Guerra o revolución. El Partido Comunista de España en la Guerra Civil (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010). It also contains a sustained rebuttal of Bolloten's and Payne's major theses.
7 Our criticism of Besteiro, who enjoys an almost saintly status, has been pilloried in Spain by some historians, particularly on the left.
8 Our treatment of Mera has awakened angry responses from writers who still adhere to anarchists’ conceptions of how the Civil War ought to have been fought. The clearest example of these conceptions can be found in Abraham Guillén's nonsensical booklet El error político-militar de la República. La pérdida de la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Queimada Ediciones, 2012) (reprint of El error militar de las izquierdas: estrategia de la guerra revolucionaria [1st ed. Barcelona: Hacer, 1980]). Guillén was Mera's political commissar.
9 I use the same adjective. This has been harshly contested by some Spanish historians in the naïve belief that a historian must not be judgmental.
10 Segismundo Casado, The Last Days of Madrid. The End of the Second Spanish Republic, trans. and intro. Rupert Croft-Cooke (London: Peter Davies, 1939). The biographical references to Casado given by the translator contain several factual errors. Given that Croft-Cooke was unfamiliar with Casado the suspicion arises that they were provided by the colonel himself. One of the historians of Franco's court confuses this book with the one published by Casado in 1968 (see Ricardo de la Cierva, La victoria y el caos. A los sesenta años del 1 de abril de 1939 [Madridejos: Fénix, 1999], 204 and n. 9). The same beginner's mistake is made by Casado's most recent ‘biographer’, Colonel Juan María Silvela Milans del Bosch, in the Diccionario biográfico español, where many entries on contemporary protagonists are a monument to Francoist interpretations of the Civil War. This is an indelible shame for the Real Academia de la Historia responsible for commissioning this work. In his book's dedication to ‘M.O’ (unidentified) Casado portrayed himself as a hero: ‘I left my country because I committed the grave fault of ending a fratricidal struggle, sparing my people much sterile bloodshed’. His book, he added, was a ‘brief and clear narrative of facts which will be transcendent in the perspective of history; [it] wears no literary dress […] but […] has the merits of being written with the blood of a Spanish soldier who loves his country, and illuminated with the light of truth’ (The Last Days of Madrid, vi).
11 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 1 April 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
12 TNA [The National Archives], FO371/24525, pp. 257–258. Letter by Wilfrid Roberts, Liberal MP, to R. A. Butler, 21 August 1940, and minute.
13 Nor is the file accessible on the then Captain (not Major) Hugh B. C. Pollard who participated in the famous Dragon Rapide flight to take General Franco from Las Palmas to Spanish Morocco in July 1936. The notion that Pollard was an MI6 officer at that time is wrong, see my La conspiración del general Franco y otras revelaciones acerca de una guerra civil desfigurada, revised and expanded ed. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2012).
14 Even a pro-Francoist military historian, Colonel José Manuel Martínez Bande, raised some suspicions about Cowan: see his El final de la guerra civil (Madrid: San Martín, 1985), 127. This is a point in which I happen to agree with Francoist authors.
15 TNA, FO371/175 contains the relevant information. MI6 activities in Madrid are absolutely covered in secrecy.
16 There is no reason to believe that ‘C’ was standing for Cowan.
17 For further information on this episode see TNA, FO 371/177.
18 AGMAV, Box 1124, file 9. Translation of final version by the author.
19 AGMAV, Box 1124, file 9.
20 AGMAV, Box 1124, file 9.
21 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 22 March 1949, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
22 Timothy Garton-Ash, ‘Orwell's List’, The New York Review of Books, 25 September 2003, <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/sep/25/orwells-list/> (15 November 2012) and Stephen Twigge, et al., British Intelligence. Secrets, Spies and Sources (London: The National Archives, 2008), 80–81.
23 Crozier was one of those odd characters who continued to cling to the Francoist legend about Guernica having been destroyed by the Basques themselves. See his review of Herbert R. Southworth's La destruction de Guernica: periodismo, diplomacia, propaganda e historia (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1977), in The Daily Telegraph, 27 October 1977.
24 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 15 June 1949, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
25 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 29 June 1949, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
26 Causa 1346–63. Reproduction of page 37 of the military indictment (auto de procesamiento) against Casado, 20 January 1964. This file was copied to me by the Spanish Ministry of Defence. It is available at the Archivo General e Histórico de Defensa (AHGD), Justicia Militar, Tribunal Militar Territorial 1°, Fondo Moderno, Box 607, Sumario 1346.
27 Note from the Personnel Section to the Undersecretary of War, 9 July 1962, AHGD (the file of Casado's case is too large and poorly organized to make references to single documents).
28 That is, the USSR. According to the Francoist canon on the Civil War the 1936 uprising was prepared to prevent a communist insurrection. The war itself was styled as a ‘war of liberation’ from the communist/Soviet yoke. Even today echoes of this interpretation can be found in authors as different as Beevor and Payne.
29 On 5 October 1964 the notorious General Rafael García Valiño (1898–1975), Captain General of the First Military Region, decided to dismiss (‘sobreseimiento’) the military proceedings against Casado, in AHGD.
30 In the then prevailing Cold War climate this interpretation found favour not only with the US Government, in particular after the 1953 agreement on US bases in Spain, but also among a number of Western European Governments.
31 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 1 April 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1. In Casado's own words: ‘porquería de libro […] que aparte de carecer de documentación no tenía ni pies ni cabeza’. I have long searched in vain for any Francoist or neo-Francoist historian who has characterized that book in such a harsh way.
32 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 5 June 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
33 The anarchists put the blame for the defeat squarely on the shoulders of the Communists. This is an interpretation shared by non-anarchist authors such as Antony Beevor. It is essentially based on a prior: conjecture. For a contrary view see my Las armas y el oro. Palancas de la guerra, mitos del franquismo (Barcelona: Pasado y Presente, 2013).
34 Not so by Bolloten who naïvely thought they revealed the truth incarnate.
35 Fernández de la Calzada to Casado, 27 July 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
36 Fernández de la Calzada to Casado, 27 July 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
37 This assertion means that Casado had another view about the book. Unfortunately there is no evidence to show what that view might have been.
38 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 2 August 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
39 Casado to Fernández de la Calzada, 19 September 1967, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
40 Published by Guadiana de Publicaciones. It has since been reprinted by other publishers.
41 Fernández de la Calzada to Casado, 4 May 1968, AGMA, FCP, Box 1124, File 1.
42 Who would think today of reviving the legend of the alleged communist/Negrínista coup de main? The reader does not need to look far: Colonel Silvela Milans del Bosch and the Royal Academy of History. Even in 2011–2013 William Faulkner's dictum that ‘the past is never dead. It is not even past’ still applies in Spain: see Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1950), Act 1, sc 3.
43 Viñas, El honor de la República, 436–37. Lord Perth immediately transmitted the information to London (TNA: FO371/22661). As with the preparation for the 1936 coup the British Government was always able to keep abreast of further developments. No wonder that Cowan was posted to Madrid. For the belief in a peace with honour see also Graham, ‘Casado's Ghosts’, 255–78.
44 An escapee from Madrid declared on 6 November 1938 in Salamanca that Casado feared that the capital might become encircled and be left without food. The escapee offered his services for a mediation. This might have reinforced the existing impression at Franco's headquarters.
45 As pointed out by Ángel Bahamonde and Javier Cervera, Así terminó la guerra de España (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 1999), 296, Franco's biographer Ricardo de la Cierva replaced Miaja with General Manuel Matallana and silenced Negrín's presence in his account of this episode, which he thoroughly distorted. It has been alleged that Matallana (in the Eastern Army Group) was probably working underground for Franco at that time.
46 Bahamonde and Cervera, Así terminó la guerra, 259. The latter author has also argued that the Francoist intelligence service Servicio de Información y Policía Militar [SIPM] entered into contact with Casado in September/October 1938, in Madrid en guerra. La ciudad clandestina, 1936–1939 (Madrid: Alianza, 2006), 386. Casado never said a word about this in his ‘memoirs’.
47 Casado, Así cayó Madrid, 301. In his ‘Foreword’ to Bolloten's The Spanish Civil War, Payne underlines among its most outstanding contributions ‘the final controversial Communist reassignments in military commands’, x–xv (p. xv).
48 According to a report by Antonio de Luna, who was a member of the Francoist fifth column and professor at the University of Madrid. For this particular point, widely quoted, see de la Cierva, La victoria y el caos, 214.
49 Bahamonde and Cervera, Así terminó la guerra, 266 and Cervera, Madrid en guerra, 393–440. The promises are reproduced in Documentos inéditos para la historia del Generalísimo Franco, 4 vols (Madrid: Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco, 1992), I, 292–93, doc. no. 78; the reader will observe that Franco referred to military personnel only.
50 Documentos inéditos, I, 292–93, doc. no. 78 (my emphasis).
51 Documentos inéditos, I, 292–93, doc. no. 78.
52 Documentos inéditos, I, 292–93, doc. no. 78. For a full discussion see Bahamonde and Cervera, Así terminó la guerra, 314–16.
53 The reader should be aware that Francoist historians have distorted the whole episode, conflating the two notes into the second one. For a full discussion see Bahamonde and Cervera, Así terminó la guerra, 314–16.
54 Martínez Bande, El final de la guerra civil, 130. One should note that this stalwart Francoist historian did not deem it necessary to reproduce the first notes exchanged between Casado and Franco's Headquarters. Bolloten did not even consider them (The Spanish Civil War, 706).
55 Martínez Bande, El final de la guerra civil, 137.
56 This legend was put to rest by Herbert R. Southworth, Conspiracy and the Spanish Civil War. The Brainwashing of Francisco Franco (London: Routledge, 2002). Even at the time of writing, this ludicrous notion has made a come-back in the entry on General Emilio Mola Vidal authored by the late General José María Gárate Córdoba in the curious Diccionario biográfico español: see <http://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2013/01/07/el-diccionario-biografico-encumbra-a-mola-y-millan-astray-como-esforzados-intelectuales-112371> (accessed 15 November 2012).
57 In Viñas and Hernández, El desplome de la República, Chapter IX, 219–41, there is a detailed discussion of the five rounds and their meaning. Casado's and Mera's distortions of the rounds are also highlighted.
58 Cipriano Mera, Guerra, exilio y cárcel de un anarcosindicalista (Madrid: CNT, 2006 [1st ed. 1976]), 290.
59 The handwritten notes by Negrín are available in AMAEC: Archivo de Barcelona, Juan Negrín Papers, Box RE 149, file 6, and in Negrín's personal archives in Paris.
60 This assertion is something that Bolloten is not able or willing to make, even though he adheres to the thesis of a pro-Francoist historian, Colonel Ramón Salas Larrazábal, that there was no communist coup (The Spanish Civil War, 713).
61 This writer is happy to acknowledge a previous mistake in this respect. A Colonel Casado was to be appointed director of the Artillery Academy. He was not our Casado but an officer with the same family name. My thanks to Fernando Rodríguez Mata for clarifying this point in his book Testimonios y remembranzas. Mis recuerdos de los últimos meses de la guerra de España (México D.F.: Colegio de México, 2013).
62 Juan Miguel Campanario, Los ascensos y nombramientos de militares comunistas en marzo de 1939, la sublevación del coronel Segismundo Casado y el hallazgo de un ejemplar del Diario Oficial del Ministerio de Defensa del día 5 de marzo cuya existencia se desconocía. Professor Campanario was kind enough to allow me the use of his paper for El desplome de la República. It is now accessible at <http://www2.uah.es/jmc/an40.pdf>.
63 The fact that it did not exist can be inferred from the extremely important report to Stalin prepared by the leaders of the Spanish communist party in the summer of 1939. It has been reproduced in full in Viñas and Hernández, El desplome de la República, with all the preparatory reports upon which it was based.
64 Ciutat's report to the Central Committee (CC) of the Spanish communist party has been reproduced in the CD accompanying Viñas and Hernández, El desplome de la República, 223–24, doc. no. 8.
65 The italics are mine. This can be found in Checa's report to the CC, in Viñas and Hernández, El desplome de la República, 248, doc. no. 9. Incidentally, Checa was the Politburo member who, at the ‘invitation’ of NKVD agents in Madrid, set in motion the communist machinery which led to the infamous Paracuellos massacres in November 1936.
66 José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, 3 vols (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1971), III, 292–93.
67 Notes in Negrín's Archives, Paris: mentioned in Viñas and Hernández, El desplome de la República, 239.
68 For this fundamental episode see Viñas and Hernández, El desplome de la República, 247–57.
69 Negrín's archives, Paris. Enrique Moradiellos has reproduced a slightly incomplete copy which is available in the Fundación Juan Negrín, Las Palmas. See his Don Juan Negrín (Barcelona: Península, 2006), 445.
70 Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica/Archivo General de la Guerra Civil, Salamanca: PS-Madrid, 2015.
71 Colonel Antonio Escobar was one of the key players of the Guardia Civil who smashed the military uprising in Barcelona on 19 July 1936. On 28 June 1937 he was promoted to Commanding General of the National Republican Guard. On 23 October 1938 he became commander of the Extremadura Army. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner and demoted to colonel. In December 1939 he appeared before a court martial which sentenced him to death, a foregone conclusion. He was executed on 8 February 1940; see Antonio Nuñez Calvo, ‘Antonio Escobar Huerta’, in 25 Militares de la República, coord. García Fernández, 323–53.
72 AMAV, FCP, Box 1125, File 5. This document is obviously a draft. The original was probably sent but whether Alba forwarded the letter to Franco cannot be ascertained. The letters of Casado to Alba and Franco are reproduced in facsimile (see pp. 321–23). The italics are mine.
73 Graham, ‘Casado's Ghosts’, 255–78.
74 Francisco Espinosa, La guerra civil en Huelva (Huelva: Diputación Provincial, 1996), 301.
75 José María Silvela Milans del Bosch, ‘Casado López, Segismundo’, Diccionario biográfico español, 50 vols (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2010), XII, 82–86.
76 No congratulations are due to the Real Academia de la Historia for sponsoring this kind of right-wing and neo-Francoist interpretation.